Mr P's ICT blog - Tech to raise standards!

For a couple of years, I have been visiting schools all over the country and beyond. I have noticed a growing trend in many schools and it is the workload teachers are dealing with. I may jest about it on my training days however there is a crucial issue facing our profession. The DfE recognise it and have done their own research. You can read the report here.  It is clearly having a massive impact on recruitment and retention of teachers. Teachers in England 87% know at least one person who has left the profession due to workload in the last two years. 90% have considered leaving the profession themselves in the last two years. 96% say that workload has a negative impact on personal life. (National Union of Teachers, 2014) I have been teaching for over a decade and the workload has never been as heavy as it is now. I don't even see it having a massive impact on learning. I recently looked at some writing from my class a few years ago and compared it to writing comp...

To help everyone get back into the swing of things, myself and John are offering the two READWRITEPERFORM packs for half price when bought together until the end of August! For just £10 you get two units of English that cover every element of the English curriculum. The Battle Cry and Sports Manager pack has already had a massive impact on learning in classrooms all over the world. While John and I carry on creating more engaging packs, we want to help teachers hit the ground running in September! CLICK HERE TO BUY Each pack follows the following model: The pack consists of plans for the following: Comprehension lessons that integrate and develop core reading skills at Word, Sentence and Text Level. Contextualised SPaG within the texts means students not only learn what features are being used but why and to what effect.  Writing lessons that encourage collaborative learning and independent creative writing that embeds grammar in a  meaningful...

I am thoroughly enjoying the Olympics in Rio and fully behind Team GB. As I have been watching, I was thinking about what a teacher's olympics would look like and which events would feature? So here are some ideas. Feel free to share and comment on any others I have missed! Make sure you follow on Facebook and Subscribe on YouTube:

There are some brilliant 360 degree videos that are absolutely great and would provide a fantastic stimulus for writing in class! I have previously blogged about 360 videos here - Facebook 360 videos to Inspire Writing A 360 video is created with a camera system that simultaneously records all 360 degrees of a scene. Viewers can pan and rotate a 360 video's perspective to watch it from different angles. They can be viewed on a desktop computer or a mobile through specific apps. The videos are very popular on Facebook but most are also on Youtube where you can also view them using a Google Cardboard making the video 3D and truly immersive. I have previously blogged about Virtual Reality and Google Cardboard here: Virtual Reality in the Classroom.  To do this, just tap the glasses icon on the YouTube clip: So here are a couple of my favourites for you can use in class: Rather than embed all the videos here, I have compiled a YouTube Playlist containing all the...

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